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<a name="boost_typetraits.intro"></a><a class="link" href="intro.html" title="Introduction">Introduction</a>
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<p>
      The Boost type-traits library contains a set of very specific traits classes,
      each of which encapsulate a single trait from the C++ type system; for example,
      is a type a pointer or a reference type? Or does a type have a trivial constructor,
      or a const-qualifier?
    </p>
<p>
      The type-traits classes share a unified design: each class inherits from the
      type <a class="link" href="reference/integral_constant.html" title="integral_constant">true_type</a>
      if the type has the specified property and inherits from <a class="link" href="reference/integral_constant.html" title="integral_constant">false_type</a>
      otherwise.
    </p>
<p>
      The type-traits library also contains a set of classes that perform a specific
      transformation on a type; for example, they can remove a top-level const or
      volatile qualifier from a type. Each class that performs a transformation defines
      a single typedef-member <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">type</span></code>
      that is the result of the transformation.
    </p>
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      Frederic Bron, Steve Cleary, Beman Dawes, Glen Fernandes, Aleksey Gurtovoy,
      Howard Hinnant, Jesse Jones, Mat Marcus, Itay Maman, John Maddock, Alexander
      Nasonov, Thorsten Ottosen, Roman Perepelitsa, Robert Ramey, Jeremy Siek, Robert
      Stewart and Steven Watanabe<p>
        Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
        file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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